


First...

by SLWalker



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-28
Updated: 2010-04-28
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(2254) - Sometimes, you have to survive what happens to you in what everyone claims to be 'everyday life', too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First...

The reflection in the glass was... frankly, pathetic.

Real pathetic.

Len McCoy couldn't find it in himself to care much, though. Yeah, he looked like Hell. Yeah, he was hungover and the bright, hazy Georgian sunlight was making it even worse. No, he hadn't bothered to shave in... in... a couple days? At least he managed to get a shower this morning. Stood in the stream of lukewarm water, feeling like he was getting a washdown in the Goddamn morgue like a corpse.

He wanted to be angry again. At least when he was raging, he could feel it fueling his strength. But then the anger would piss away, just like the booze, and he'd feel little more than apathetic exhaustion, the kind that went into some deep spot inside of him that medical science could never define.

He wanted to be angry at himself, for falling into this cycle. He wanted to be angry with Jocelyn, for pushing him into it in the first place. He wanted to be angry with his father, for putting it on him to pull the plug, the catalyst for all of it.

_First, do no harm._

Some doctor he turned out to be.

Len rubbed his hand over his face, but he couldn't drag himself away from the reflection. Not because he wanted to see it, but because he didn't have the strength. He knew that he was probably clinically depressed by now, and that surviving that meant getting help, but still he didn't seek it. He looked into a bottle, or into his work. Pity on both sides -- his own self-pity in the bottom of the bourbon, or everyone else's at the hospital.

Eventually something had to break, and eventually something did.

He passed the playground that they used to take Joanna to on his way home the day before, the one where he pushed her on the swings, the one they shared a picnic at, and he saw the image of his family, and saw his little girl with her pigtails bouncing, his daughter that his wife took away in their divorce, all the while spitting out meaningless words about how this was the best thing for them...

...and he went home, and he tried to drink the hurt away, and the rage that came with that pain buried in some place that no surgery could ever touch; went home and howled his anger and sobbed his grief and broke things.

When the sun rose, it came with a hangover and more depression, and the certain knowledge that he had only two choices now:

Live or die.

Staring into his own reflection, he didn't even know which one it would be. To live, he had to get away from the hurt, at least long enough to get his bearings. He couldn't survive when he was near his baby girl's things, the clothes packed in dressers that still smelled like her, a scent he knew from the day she was born, now fading. He couldn't survive when Jocelyn would call and update him, looking at him with those eyes filled with a sort of sorrow that only made him hate her even as he still loved her. He could not walk their roads, past the places they shared as a family, and still want to wake up each day.

He didn't know which one it would be, but the words kept haunting him, forcing him to act.

_First, do no harm._

It took him several moments to get his energy up, and then Len McCoy walked to the door of the Starfleet Recruitment Office, and went inside.


End file.
